Don’t get me wrong – Slack is an extremely well-designed, well-built platform. The integrations are great and the ability to build tools and bots on top of it is pretty awesome. It’s a valuable messaging tool, which is why the company is the fastest growing business app ever.

The underlying philosophy of Slack and many business communication apps – a stream of messages with little organization – is what’s bothersome to me.

My problems with Slack

Imagine you work on a remote team and you’re 12 hours ahead of most of your team members. While they’re in the middle of their work day, you’re deep asleep. Not only will you be bombarded with notifications, but you’ll also wake up to a cacophony of messages with very little idea of what subject was started where and by whom.

Another example is going on vacation. I was on a two-week trek to Thailand and got pinged with many messages that had nothing to do with me. The messages that were relevant to me were buried deep in multiple channels. I actually didn’t realize I missed messages until one of my co-workers asked me if I saw the message he sent to me.

And I know that I’ve sent many messages that were missed or unread.

At the core of the problem is notifications.

Yes, you can set certain your notification preferences – such as seeing all notifications, only those messages that mention your name, or no notifications for a channel. Those aren’t granular enough, and I find that I still miss a lot of stuff no matter which option I choose. And all you hear all day is that knock brush sound.

Another issue is that Slack doesn’t provide you with email notifications, so it forces you to use its tool to check notifications and messages, which again leads to missed messages. This is great for their engagement metrics, but not great for productivity.

Twist – a more thoughtful communication tool

I’ve been using a relatively new messaging tool called Twist, which is built by the same company who created the popular Todoist productivity app.

The philosophy and benefits of the tool are laid out nicely in this Medium post written by Twist’s creator.

We use Twist for WinOptix. Our team is pretty small (only 3 of us, all part-time), so our message volume isn’t very high. But we’ve already seen benefits from the different approach Twist has taken to messaging.

Channels and Threads

Like Slack, Twist has channels that you can denote subjects for, such as “Design”, “Development”, “Marketing”, and more. But Twist goes one level deeper with threads within each of these channels. So under “Development”, we have a thread for “Development Task Organization”, where our developer and I discussed the best way to organize development tasks, and “FPDS data – GitLab Repo” where we talk about how to access troves of government contracting data.

These threads portray the messages in a more granular fashion so you have a better idea of what the conversation is about.

Twist’s channels and threads

Sender can choose who receives notifications

The next big feature is the ability for the sender to select who receives notifications. This is HUGE.

Let’s say that I just want to ask our developer a direct question. I’ll just select his name in the “Notify” field and ask away. He’ll be the only one who receives a notification. Everyone else who is part of that channel will be left alone but will still be able to view that message at any time.

This is the best of both worlds. This gives the sender the power to minimize distractions for his or her team, not just the receiver to minimize distractions for herself.

In Slack, you can type “@username” to specifically mention someone in a message, but if other employees in that channel have selected to receive notifications for all messages, they’ll still get pinged with this message.

(BTW, as I’m writing this, I just got pinged with a Slack notification that had nothing to do with me. Ugh.)

Email notifications

Everyone hates email, but I don’t think it’s that bad. I used to receive 200 emails a day, but I’ve pruned that down to less than half. Maybe I’ve just gotten less popular. :/

I might be old-fashioned, but my email inboxes are the center of my work life.

Anyway, I love how Twist sends me email notifications about messages that have been recently posted. This allows me to see if I missed anything important without having to check all of the messages in the app itself. And the asynchronous nature of email lets me review messages whenever I please.

Conclusion

This may seem like I’m hating on Slack, but I’m not. It’s a really great piece of software, but it just doesn’t work all that well with the way that I work.

And I’m not getting paid by Twist to write this post. I just think it’s a very well thought-out tool that focuses more on productivity as opposed to just communication.

The caveat here is that we don’t yet have a high volume of messages, but I think that the way Twist is set up, ramping up the volume won’t be as distracting.

Anyway, if you’re frustrated with the constant pinging and missed messages, I’d suggest giving Twist a shot. If you do, let me know what you think!

There is a TON of great information about user onboarding, customer support, and much more.

But the enduring theme that I took out of the lecture was how to incorporate your personality into your product to make it something that your users love to use.

With Wufoo, they did things like include interesting microcopy, like having “RARRR!” pop up when you hover over the dinosaur login button:

Another example was from one of Wufoo’s customers who included some hilarious microcopy in their sign-up form:

Every time you open Slack, they’ll have an amusing message waiting for you to start your day:

Of course, you need to build a product that provides value to the user, is fast, doesn’t crash all the time, has solid design, and has all of the other baseline things that a good product should have.

But these little user experience details count a lot, and incorporating your personality into your product wherever possible can delight users and keep them coming back. It can build trust, put a smile on users’ faces, and make them feel loved.

While product designs will differ, many products that do similar things tend to feel the same. There are many online form tools like Wufoo that get the job done. But the microcopy and other details that reflect the company’s personality can be the difference in winning or losing that customer.

Have you encountered a product where you saw the company’s personality shine through? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

This week we continue the theme of customer development mistakes I’ve made in the past. Similar to last week’s post, this one is about building the application too early, and how you can test your concept with wireframes and mockups before coding it.

Lack of testing mockups for Dokkit and ribl

We didn’t do any customer development for Dokkit and built an alpha version of the app too early.

After some debate about what the app might look like, my co-founders cranked out the V1 of the app in a couple of months.

A smarter path would have been to create mockups of the app and test them with our target audience.

You can create clickable mockups using tools like InVision, Balsamiq, or Mockflow (which I use) that simulate how the app might work and behave. It won’t look like the polished app you envision, but it can reflect the core features and functionality that the first version of your app might have. And you can create pretty detailed mockups in a few hours or days, not months.

Same with ribl. Instead of spending a couple of months to build the first version of the app, we could have created mobile mockups with InVision, Fluid UI, or the many other mobile mockup tools on the market.

And we could have tested these mockups on both Android and iPhone before spending all the time building for both platforms (another big mistake that I’ll probably blog about in a future post).

Because you can edit mockups easily, you can rapidly incorporate your testers’ feedback into the next version of your mockups and test them again. This rapid iteration cycle will allow you to continuously improve the “product” to the point where you’ll feel pretty comfortable that you’re building something people want.

Testing mockups with WinOptix

After I believed that the concept of WinOptix was validated via over 40 customer development interviews, I started working on the mockups.

It took me a decent amount of time putting these mockups together because I just didn’t have a strong vision of what the app might look like. I got some great input from Dave and Carolina, the developer and UX designer whom I’m working with, and incorporated their feedback into the designs.

After we were done with creating the mockups, I had a bad feeling that the tests were going to go horribly and that the mockups were completely wrong.

There was only one way to find out.

I reached back out to the people whom I interviewed and up until today, I’ve shown seven of them the mockups.

We weren’t as wrong as I thought we’d be, which was pleasantly surprising. I received some excellent feedback about changes that need to be made, features that should be added and subtracted, and what parts of the mockups really stood out.

It would have taken a few months to build a first version of the app that I mocked up in a couple of weeks. So we saved a ton of time, and I saved a bunch of my development budget.

My goal is to show the mockups to at least 15 people.

The ideal situation is that one of the test subjects becomes so impressed with the value that WinOptix might bring to their organization that they’ll pre-pay us to build the app. If that doesn’t happen, hopefully a couple of the respondents will agree to trial the app when our V1 goes live.

Regardless, we’ll review all of the feedback and determine what changes need to be made and how to proceed from there.

Conclusion

Testing mockups is a continuation of the early-stage customer development process and is a MUCH cheaper and faster way to obtain feedback from your target customer.

Your mockups might be completely wrong, or they may be on point. Either way, you’ll have a much better idea of what your next steps are without spending tens of thousands of dollars and/or months of your time coding the first version of your application.

We’ll see what happens as things progress with WinOptix, but testing mockups has been really beneficial so far.

I learned this lesson the hard way and I hope you won’t have to!

Here are some other resources about how to use mockups before building your app:

But earlier this week, while I was searching for a restaurant to make a rezzie for Valentine’s Day, I realized that OpenTable has SO MANY MORE reviews than Yelp. Did you know that?

For Rural Society (where we’re going on Tuesday – have you been?), Yelp has 280 reviews, while OpenTable has more than two times the number, 571.

For Woodward Table, Yelp has 370 reviews, while OpenTable has 1136! More than 3x!

For Art and Soul, Yelp has 719 reviews and OpenTable has 3840! That’s more than 5x!

What’s going on here?

The questions I pondered were:

Why is Yelp so much more top of mind than OpenTable when looking for restaurant ratings and reviews?

Why does OpenTable have so many more reviews?

Which site should I trust more when looking for restaurant reviews?

Why is Yelp so much more top of mind than OpenTable when looking for restaurant ratings and reviews?

This is the case because Yelp’s primary reason for existence is to provide reviews of local businesses, primarily restaurants, to its users.

One the other hand, OpenTable’s main use case is to make reservations, and the reviews are a secondary feature.

Thus, Yelp is able to focus on communicating its core value proposition of restaurant ratings and reviews. So when they run online or TV ads, they can focus on how they have real reviews from real people. Then when their users talk about their app, they’ll use the same jargon.

That focus can be a very powerful thing in staying top of mind and acquiring users.

Why does OpenTable have so many more reviews?

The reason why OpenTable has so many more reviews is simple – because they own the transaction of making reservations.

People primarily use Yelp to research restaurants they might eat at. And while you can make reservations through Yelp (they actually had a partnership with OpenTable for years to do so), this is a secondary offering. There are relatively few transactions that happen on Yelp.

You use OpenTable to transact, and that’s a very powerful place for them to be. In order to make a rezzie, you need to sign up and login. Then they can capture and store your info and restaurant preferences, and deliver deals and specials to you.

And because they own that transaction, they are able to prompt you for a review after each time you’ve gone to a restaurant, which is why they have so many more reviews than Yelp.

Because Unilever typically sold their products through supermarkets and drug stores, they had no relationship with the end customer. They had no idea who was buying their product and how often. On the other hand, Dollar Shave Club had tons of information about their customers’ buying habits.

Apparently, that’s worth a lot of money.

Which site should I trust more when looking for restaurant reviews?

This is an interesting question.

Yelp has done a great job recruiting reviewers who write very in-depth, comprehensive reviews of their experiences. Most Yelp reviews are multiple paragraphs long and many include images. On the other hand, the reviews on OpenTable are typically much shorter and less detailed.

But with Yelp, you can only give a single star rating, which represents the overall experience with your meal. On OpenTable, you can provide ratings for food, ambiance, service, and value, which give the reader a more multi-faceted profile of the dining experience. Both are on a scale of 1-5, which I really hate. It doesn’t give the reviewer enough of a range to give a meaningful rating; I prefer 1-7. Just sayin.

And the amount of reviews! Yelp has significantly fewer reviews per restaurant than OpenTable. If you’re a proponent of the wisdom of the crowds, OpenTable is the place to be.

And from a small sample size that I looked at, it seems like the ratings on Yelp, on average, are lower than that of OpenTable. Are Yelpers more discerning? I’m not sure.

Conclusion

I found it very interesting when I discovered that OpenTable had so many more reviews.

From this discovery, I came to two conclusions.

Yelp will probably still be the first place I look when searching for restaurant reviews, but I think I’ll also refer to OpenTable’s reviews for more context.

I also realized how valuable owning the transaction is for a business; in this case, for amassing a high volume of reviews. OpenTable has a great business where restaurants pay them for every reservation made by a diner, and they are certainly the market leader when it comes to online restaurant reservations.

And even though reviews are a secondary feature of the platform, they are extremely valuable. OpenTable has done a great job in amassing so many more reviews than Yelp. And I think if they wanted to highlight their restaurant reviews to garner more traffic and go head-on against Yelp, they can certainly do so effectively.

Good products just seamlessly work, with no problems. I love when that happens.

My Macbook, even though it’s old, still works just fine. My Android Nexus 5 phone has lasted almost three years (a lifetime for smartphones) without being buggy. My thermos keeps my tea hot for hours, just like the label said it would.

Comcast cable and internet works half the time (thank God I have Fios now). The Bluetooth connection in my car sucks. The Hootsuite Android app, while valuable to someone who manages multiple social media accounts, sometimes doesn’t listen to me. My dishwasher is the quietest dishwasher I’ve ever used but the dishes don’t always come out clean.

If you can depend on a product just doing its job as advertised, that’s a good product. The other bells and whistles are just gravy.

Some of the best products are the ones we don’t have to think about. It’s pretty simple – build something that works, do what you say you can do, and everyone wins.

I love when things just work.

What are some of the products that just work for you? Talk to me in the comments!

I hope you found this interesting! If so, please share this article with the share buttons on the left! That’d be awesome of you.

I’ve been sick the last couple of days, so I didn’t write a blog post yesterday. To make up for it, I’m going to write about two topics today. Yay!

Being sick sucks

First topic – being sick sucks. Not just because it physically doesn’t feel good, but it makes me feel worthless.

As much as lying on the couch watching Band of Brothers and other TV shows sounds great, being sick makes me feel that I am shirking my other responsibilities, inconveniencing others, and disrupting people’s schedules.

First, I got no work done the last couple of days, and that work is piling up. Doesn’t make me feel good.

And I’ve had to move a bunch of meetings around. I had to cancel a podcast interview (I would have sounded like shit), and postpone some other calls and meetings. I don’t like to disrupt other’s schedules like that.

Also, I typically get my baby Maya dressed in the morning while my wife walks the dog. She and my mother-in-law have had to cover for me the last couple of days while I slept in. I’m inconveniencing them.

So while rest and relaxation is necessary to recover, my mind just didn’t rest well knowing the residual effects of my sickness.

I just won’t get sick next time.

NFL on Twitter

Yesterday, the NY Jets played the Buffalo Bills on Thursday Night Football, and it was the first NFL game ever live-streamed on Twitter.

I watched some of the game and it was pretty awesome (both the game and the live-stream).

Here is what it looked like (courtesy of Recode, that’s not me in a supermarket):

No buffering, no delay, and tweets right below the stream so you can engage with other viewers.

Twitter has been skewered for slow user growth and a confusing value proposition to new users. On the other hand, avid users love the platform for real-time discussion of current events.

That’s why streaming NFL games is perfect for Twitter.

Sports is the most real-time content that you can get. Sports are essentially DVR-proof and discussions and debates about games being played are already happening on Twitter.

And the NFL is the king of US sports right now, so this should bring in many NFL fans to the Twitter platform.

And I see Thursday Night Football leveraging tweets in their broadcast more often in the future.

I think live streaming sports and other content will be the future of Twitter and it’s a big step in turning the company around for the better.

What are your thoughts about being sick and the NFL on Twitter? Talk to me in the comments!

I hope you found this interesting! If so, please share this article with the share buttons on the left! That’d be awesome of you.

While it wasn’t as entertaining or laugh-inducing as I expected, I was surprised how enlightened I was after listening to it.

There were two points that Aziz made that stood out to me.

The first one was how Aziz dealt with his compulsion with checking his Facebook and Twitter accounts constantly. He deleted those apps from his phone and went completely cold turkey on social media.

Next was how he deals with fans who want to take pictures with him on the street. He doesn’t allow these people to take pictures with him, but instead shakes their hands, asks their names, and has a genuine conversation with them for a couple of minutes.

These seemingly unrelated things struck a chord with me.

I think it highlights how someone truly understands the values of human interaction and how technology can negatively impact how you engage with others.

Overall, I think we live in an amazing world where we can do unbelievable things that are facilitated by technology. Hell, I’ve made it my career to help build these tools.

But like Aziz taught me, if you understand the ways technology are negatively impacting your life, you can make the changes that allow you to form stronger and deeper connections with the people around you.

What do you think about the relationship between technology and deeper connections?

I hope you found this interesting! If so, please share this article with the share buttons on the left. Then sign up for my email list below and connect with me on Twitter for future updates. And check out my podcast at GoandGrowPodcast.com!

Some I think are beautifully designed and well thought-out. Others look like crap or don’t make any sense to me why buttons are placed where they are or why things work the way they do.

Sometimes people agree with me, other times they disagree.

That’s the wonderful thing about design, or anything subjective, really – that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

What might be ugly to some is beautiful to others.

What might be a good experience to one person is subpar to another.

Another interesting thing is that there are many layers of beauty.

The interface of an app like Gmail might not look as nice as other email applications such as Yahoo Mail or Outlook.com. But it just works much better, which is a thing of beauty.

In everyday life, beautiful people on the outside might be ugly on the inside. And vice versa. But everyone will look different to everyone, inside and out.

Everyone has their own opinion of what beauty is, and no one is right or wrong.

Beauty being in the eye of the beholder is a beautiful thing.

What are your thoughts about beauty? Do you believe it’s in the eye of the beholder? I’d love to hear from you. Write your thoughts in the comments, tweet at me @mikewchan, or email me at mike@mikewchan.com.

I hope you found this interesting! If so, please share this article with the share buttons on the left. Then sign up for my email list below and connect with me on Twitter for future updates. And check out my podcast at GoandGrowPodcast.com!

I can’t stress enough how important timing is to everything, good and bad.

I recently had an experience with horrible timing.

Vicky and I recently purchased a townhouse and were preparing to move. We had a few boxes packed and were prepping to rent out the condo we currently live in.

Then the unit above us had an accident with the fire sprinkler that wound up flooding our condo. The hardwood floors were damaged and a lot of the drywall had to be cut so they could blow air to dry the insulation in the walls.

We’ve been living in a hotel for the last two weeks while our condo is being repaired. Ugh.

Perfect timing, huh?

Of course, timing can be good as well.

Back when I was thinking about leaving my job to become an entrepreneur, I knew finances would be an issue. Even though my wife would support me, I would have to garner some income to help out.

Right around when I left, I was able to immediately score two consulting contracts to help keep my finances afloat. One of those contracts came from a guy I sat next to at a conference!

But Uber was timed perfectly to align with the GPS capabilities of the smartphone.

Virtual reality has been around for decades but many companies who tried to commercialize this technology over the years, couldn’t.

Only now is it reaching the mainstream with Oculus, Samsung Gear VR, Google Cardboard, and others.

Sometimes there’s not much you can do about timing, but just hope that the timing is right.

Do you have situations where timing was perfect (sarcastic and not sarcastic) for you? I’d love to hear from you. Write your thoughts in the comments, tweet at me @mikewchan, or email me at mike@mikewchan.com.

I hope you found this interesting! If so, please share this article with the share buttons on the left. Then sign up for my email list below and connect with me on Twitter for future updates. And check out my podcast at GoandGrowPodcast.com!

Because the Oakland Athletics couldn’t compete with other big-budget baseball teams for top players, general manager Billy Beane had to change the way players were scouted for the team to be competitive.

Instead, Beane focused more on advanced metrics such as on-base percentage and slugging percentage to scout and recruit players and find diamonds in the rough. He realized that these statistics were more important to winning than the traditional stats, which were more about vanity.

This analytics-based methodology, called Sabermetrics, was absolutely scrutinized, and Beane was chastised by old-school scouts and managers.

This approach is still criticized to this day, even though the Athletics have been competitive with a tiny payroll for many years, and the Boston Red Sox won a World Series shortly after implementing the system.

Many middling teams knew they needed something stay competitive, but they didn’t want this kind of solution.

The need-want gap.

This happens many other industries as well.

Large businesses that have been around for many decades plod along with their traditional products and business models while startups disrupt them. Many deny the fact that they are being disrupted. Case in point here and here.

Ambitious job seekers may see that these companies need fresh thinking and innovation, but those jobs just aren’t available because these companies are satisfied with their position and don’t want to change.

The need-want gap.

Politics and government. Energy. Construction. Media. Music. All of these traditional industries have been slow to develop new business models as technology impacts them immensely.

If you’re seeking a career where you want to make change in these old-school industries, you might find that your services and ideas aren’t welcome.

But if you’re persistent and have a vision for the change you want to enact, keep going. Companies in these industries will come around when they have to.

If you can convince them that change is good and necessary, you can shrink that need-want gap and make your mark.

I hope you found this interesting! If so, please share this article with the share buttons on the left. Then sign up for my email list below and connect with me on Twitter for future updates. And check out my podcast at GoandGrowPodcast.com!